Nas4Free user here. Home server, nothing fancy but worked perfectly for a few years on a Atom CPU based board with 4GB RAM which could not be expanded further and is listed as minimum required for ZFS.
Would this hardware run FreeNAS/TrueNAS or its differences and additional features would require beefier iron? Current configuration is two ZFS RAID 1 pairs plus one additional disk for quick buffering. System currently boots from a USB dongle; the board very conveniently does have a USB receptacle directly soldered, so it doesn't expose the flash key to the outside. No problems in about 4 years, but some day probably this year I'll have to get new disks either due to aging or available space, then get the ball rolling and manually upgrade to XimaNAS (automatic update from this NAS4Free version is risky), or moving to FreeNAS/TrueNAS, or jumping ship completely and get one Helios64 box plus OMV since BSD support on ARM isn't there yet. Any comments?
ps. I'm more of a Linux guy, my BSD knowledge is limited to this NAS4Free installation and a pfSense firewall I run ages ago on PCEngines embedded boards which worked like charm as well.
More RAM is better, it will probably work, but be slow. However the same can be said for your current configuration which you seem happy with.
Don't use a USB boot disk though. FreeNAS writes to the boot disk enough to detroy most USB drives in a few months. A high quality USB drive wouldn't have that problem but they don't seem to exist.
You're right, but in my case it's the embedded "install" (actually a dd write to the USB flash device), which lets the system run entirely in RAM, so the boot disk is never written except when upgrading the system or when the user modifies then saves the configuration, which usually after the first install happens rarely.
This makes the NAS less versatile as I can't install lots of extensions, but the included ones are more than enough for me.
Yes, I know more RAM would help a lot; unfortunately I have no way to expand it, save for moving to bigger faster platforms which then would cost more in energy as I keep it on 24/7. The system however appears to use just about 50% of the available RAM and is very snappy for my purposes.
I've used my FreeNAS with the same USB drive for a few years now, so seems to be fine. Most activity is against the system dataset (which is on my RAID-Z), no?
When did you last update? If you have used FreeNAS for years you might be on an old version that almost never wrote to the USB and so you are fine. A couple years ago they made some changes and now FreeNAS writes to the USB often and as a result most USB drives last for only a few months.
I started out with FreeNAS ~18 months ago but I'm not sure at the moment which version that was (I could check later). About a year ago, I updated to 11.2-U2 and just two days ago I've updated to 11.3-U1.
Since the beginning, I've had the "freenas-boot" pool on a pair of USB3 flash drives -- I don't recall which manufacturer/model I'm using but I did specifically buy "higher end" flash drives to use for this purpose. I do a weekly scrub of the "freenas-boot" pool and, thus far, I've experienced no issues with them whatsoever.
FWIW, it's very rare for me to actually log in to the FreeNAS system to make any changes or perform any "administration". I set it up initially and, since then, I've mostly left it alone and it "just works".
I've kept up to date, last update was a month ago or so? It's now running FreeNAS-11.3-RELEASE.
Using the graphs I do see some hourly write activity to the USB device. But say it writes 10MB of data (graph shows ~100kB) every hour for half a year, that's still just ~41GB, just over one drive write in my case.
So maybe some services cause it to write much more data?
ps. I'm more of a Linux guy, my BSD knowledge is limited to this NAS4Free installation and a pfSense firewall I run ages ago on PCEngines embedded boards which worked like charm as well.